Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford

Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, CBE, better known as Elizabeth Longford was a British author. Born Elizabeth Harman and a daughter of eye... specialist Nathaniel Bishop Harman, she was educated at the Francis Holland School, and was an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. "Able, articulate and beautiful", in the words of The New York Times, she was "the Zuleika Dobson of her day, with undergraduates and even dons tumbling over one another to fall in love with her". A few years after her graduation, on 3 November 1931, she married Francis Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, who died in August 2001. Her obituary by the BBC said the marriage was "famously harmonious." The New York Times, in its review of The Pebbled Shore, called Lady Longford "easily the best writer in what is predominantly a literary family". She and her husband were both devout Roman Catholic converts, Lady Longford having been raised a Unitarian, and avid social reformers. The Longfords had eight children, among them the writers Lady Antonia Fraser, Lady Rachel Billington, and Thomas Pakenham.
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The Hon. Dame Anne Laura Dorinthea McLaren, DBE, FRS, FRCOG was the daughter of Henry McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway and Christabel McNaughten. She... became a leading figure in developmental biology. Her work helped lead to human in vitro fertilisation . She received many honours for her contributions to science, including being made an officer of the Royal Society. She studied zoology at Oxford University, gaining entrance to Lady Margaret Hall and obtaining an MA. Researching mite infestation of Drosophila under J. B. S. Haldane, she continued postgraduate studies at University College London, first under Peter Medawar on the genetics of rabbits and then on neurotropic murine viruses under Kingsley Sanders. She obtained her D.Phil in 1952 and married fellow student Dr Donald Michie on 6 October 1952. As a couple, McLaren and Donald Michie worked together at University College, London 1952–1955, and afterwards at the Royal Veterinary College, on the variation in the number of lumbar vertebrae in mice as a function of maternal environment. Dr McLaren would later take up research on fertility in mice, including superovulation and superpregnancy.
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Dame Veronica Wedgwood OM DBE was an English historian who generally published under the name C. V. Wedgwood. She specialized in European history... of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including her still-authoritative study The Thirty Years' War and biographies of Oliver Cromwell, William the Silent, and Cardinal Richelieu, as well as the authoritative Caroline trilogy,The Great Rebellion, which included The King’s Peace , The King’s War , and The Trial of Charles I , reprinted as A Coffin for King Charles. Thirty years after she published her much-praised biography of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, she returned to the subject and published a much-revised version that was considerably more critical of her subject. Historians often cite Wedgwood's two lives of Strafford as an illustration of scholarly integrity and open-mindedness. Born in Northumberland, she was educated at Norland Place School and read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and became a specialist in the English Civil War and early 17th century history.
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Lindsey Davis is an English historical novelist, best known as the author of the Falco series of crime stories set in ancient Rome and its empire.... Davis was born in Birmingham and after taking a degree in English literature at Oxford University , she became a civil servant. She left the civil service after 13 years, and when a romantic novel she had written was runner up for the 1985 Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize, she decided to become a writer, writing at first romantic serials for the UK women's magazine Woman's Realm. Her interest in history and archaeology led to her writing a historical novel about Vespasian and his lover Antonia Caenis , for which she could not find a publisher. She tried again, and her first novel featuring the Roman "detective", Marcus Didius Falco, The Silver Pigs, set in the same time period and published in 1989, was the start of her runaway success as a writer of historical whodunnits. A further nineteen Falco novels have followed, as well as The Course of Honour, which was finally published in 1998.
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